Category: Audio and Video

In my years of working with career-oriented linguists, I’ve recognized a simple opportunity that more linguists should be exploiting: we need to be having more conversations about career!

That’s why it so exciting to have a version of this book now available in audio book form, one that feels more like a conversation. A conversation about career conversations!

If you’ve never used audible before, your first book is free!!

Be sure to use this link so that they know you were sent by me!About Bringing Linguistics to Work:
This book has been designed to help linguists bring linguistic knowledge, skills, and abilities to the task of communicating about our knowledge, skills, and abilities in the texts and interactions that comprise looking for a job.

You are not likely to find a job application where the ability to “rigorously analyze language and the social construction of meaning” is being sought. Most employers are not actively looking for a linguist—much as they might need one—simply because they do not know to ask for what we bring. In any career interaction, the onus is always on the jobseeker to make the case, but if it feels harder for linguists, it is because what is being brought is likely wholly unfamiliar. The good news is that we can anticipate this misunderstanding and bring our knowledge of the ways that language structures and is structured by interaction to manage the complexity and ambiguity entailed in helping others to clearly see how our knowledge, skills, and abilities make us uniquely suited for a given job’s tasks, duties, and responsibilities.

I like to think about this showing how it what you bring matches what is needed as a venn diagram:

Your communication task is to communicate the alignment in the overlap. And pPerspective-taking, or being able to put yourself in the shoes of those reading your materials, is key. This begins with knowledge. You need to have knowledge about what you bring, about what they need, and about how what you bring aligns with what they need. It also requires an ability to describe this alignment using language that will be understood, which will also mean having knowledge about their ways of communicating, knowing about their expectations and values etc etc etc.

So, it’s probably no surprise to discover that you have some homework to do. But the good news is that linguists are very well positioned to do that homework—and to do it well. We are experts in language after all. There is absolutely no reason why our resumes, cover letters, and LinkedIn profiles shouldn’t be the very best ones out there in terms of effectively communicating an alignment of needs with skills. But more than anything, we need to bring attention to the language we use in networking interactions.

And not just when we are job seeking!

We need to continually participate in open, broad-ranging discussions about our skills and interests, and professional applications thereof. We need to make space for conversations that invite curiosity and establish connection and community. We need to listen for, find, and tell more career stories. Such interactions are a crucial means for discovering what we can offer the world of work. They give us insights into where we are needed and the kinds of things we might be doing, opening our eyes to possibilities we might never have considered. Importantly, they may also create opportunities to do just that. They are also the way to begin a career journey because they afford us valuable opportunities to practice talking about ourselves, to gauge how our message is coming across and adjust it, to solicit feedback and to ask for things!

Scholars in conversation analysis have known for a long time that we try to avoid using the word ‘no’. We rely on a number of other linguistic resources to ‘say no’ in order to save face. So why is this word necessary in one very specific, high-stakes situation? Liz Marasco has Master of Arts in Linguistics from CU Boulder where she specialized in conversation analysis. She believes opportunity and vulnerability exist in every interaction. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Mackenzie Price talks with us about how she works as a researcher and discourse analyst in the work that she does with the FrameWorks Institute, where she helps advocates tell more powerful stories about their issues, or as she puts it “guide them through a process of thinking about how the language that they use is interpreted.” As she explains, she comes to everything that she does thinking about language as a system, and thinking about interpretation as a process and the fact that any cue can be interpreted multiple ways depending on past knowledge, experiences, and current schemas in place. And by way of illustration, she shared an example that was hot off the presses – a mere three hours old!

Many lessons from her discussion of impact are quite applicable to us linguists, especially that circumstance she describes of the implications of not having the importance of your work be understood.

My favorite quote from the interview is my new tagline: “Linguists. We have something to say about everything that has ever happened!”

Additionally, Mackenzie is a professor in a business school, and she shared with us a bit about what her linguistic skills look like in that institutional context: one where (like any other setting) a linguist can investigate the language of things like power, identity construction, and professionalization. She describes how in her Research Methods course, her linguistics training is evident even in how she teaches her students how to understand what’s going on in their workplaces!

Thank you Mackenzie for sharing your energy and evident passion for your work with us here at the campfire!!

Catch up on any stories that you have missed by going to the stories around the campfire page here on Career Linguist.Linguists’ skills and training can be brought to the challenges of our time – listen to hear what pressing questions these folks address in their work and where they see more opportunities for linguists in future. If you would like to recommend someone for the series (including yourself), contact Career Linguist.

Hannah gives great perspective for anyone embarking on a new career, from the perspective of someone who has just started a new job herself, not just 4 months ago. The conversation begins with a glimpse of a day in the life on the Bixby project at Samsung Research America – whose goal is to have users to be able to do anything with their phone through voice that they could do through touch – and then moves to charting the “wise wandering” that has comprised her multifaceted and rich career path. Ever wondered how linguistics could show up in work as a bartender? Or as part of educational work in a prison?

She graduated with her MA from San Francisco State (go Gators!) just 4 years ago, but has done work in fiction writing, framing, teaching, and bartending since then, and translation / interpretation, localization, and project management before then.

Drawing from the breadth and depth of her perspective, we touch on themes of “making it” professionally, the importance of trying things out, and the idea that putting yourself out there is the way to get where you are going (there’s no other way!)

Thank you Hannah for sharing a wonderfully detailed picture of herself at work!

Catch up on any stories that you have missed by going to the stories around the campfire page here on Career Linguist.Linguists’ skills and training can be brought to the challenges of our time – listen to hear what pressing questions these folks address in their work and where they see more opportunities for linguists in future. If you would like to recommend someone for the series (including yourself), contact Career Linguist.

Thank you Julia for sharing a beautifully inspiring story of “leap and the net will appear.”

Our conversation began with some great insight into the day-to-day of data analysis. Julia shared some concrete examples which demonstrate the value of social listening – a subset of the textual analyses involved in market analysis – including some popular case studies and examples from her own analyses. We then turned to a discussion of bringing linguistics to thinking about career drawing from Julia’s background as the Director of PhD Career Services at Michigan State University.

As she shares in the interview: “everything about the idea of career transition is about language.” Typically the central challenge for academics is not that of lacking the appropriate skills – it is how to translate what we know – and how we know what we know – to an audience that isn’t familiar with academese. Sometimes it’s just as simple as talking about teaching experience on a resume as “training” or knowing that someone won’t necessarily know that you bring experience in public speaking or being able to recognize some of the ways that our own rhetorical practices get heard and interpreted so that we learn to talk about our expertise in ways that enable others to truly hear and to trust our expertise!

Among my favorite moments in the conversation was Julia’s declaration “linguists are uniquely situated to be really good resume writers because its really all about manipulating language and figuring out ‘what does this person want to hear?'” Her enthusiasm for the textual practices and processes of applying for jobs is contagious, so I hope you will take a listen, and then share with us here at Career Linguist what she inspires you to get on out there and do!! Thank you again Julia, can’t wait to see what comes next!!

Catch up on any stories that you have missed by going to the stories around the campfire page here on Career Linguist.Linguists’ skills and training can be brought to the challenges of our time – listen to hear what pressing questions these folks address in their work and where they see more opportunities for linguists in future. If you would like to recommend someone for the series (including yourself), contact Career Linguist.

Our guest next Friday at the campfire will be Mackenzie Price, telling us about her work at the FrameWorks Institute, where she works with social change advocates to change the public conversation about their issues!

this is how she describes the work on LinkedIn:

As an experienced strategic communications researcher, trainer, and consultant, I work primarily with non-profit organizations to translate experts’ perspectives on social issues and better engage the public. I use my background as an Interactional Sociolinguist to help partners look beyond dissemination efforts, and use social science research methodology to anticipate how the public will interpret their messaging.

Linguists are bringing their skills and training to address the challenges of our time – tune in weekly to the Career Campfire to hear folks talk about what pressing questions they address in their work and where they see opportunities for linguists.